The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim

The gamers I find myself attracted to are those who cannot resist the extra adventure, the additional battle, the scale-tipping boss fights. It feels necessary to assert and celebrate this, for we are living in puritanical times. The contemporary preference seems to be for the economical, the mundane, for simple precision (though there is of course such a thing as complex precision). Gaming, it would appear, should be neat and streamlined. Fantasy shouldn’t be allowed to obscure a good quest. There is a craving for easily relatable and sympathetic characters. Among gamers and modders, the RPG is more likely to be praised than the linear or sequential. Embellished quest lines are treated with suspicion, if not dismissed outright as overwritten, pretentious or self-indulgent. Loser gamers are everywhere.

Yet so many of the most esteemed gamers – the ones we see and hear again and again– are of the FPS school. It is hard, for instance, not to be bowled over by the improvisatory verve of Bethesdas most brilliant Skyrim. Skyrim is vital and inclusive, teeming with life. This is the single greatest RPG of all time, which assessment certainly cannot be disputed.

Skyrim is a mediocre RPG. The stories are simplistic, the characters are one dimensional, the combat is easy regardless of difficulty level, and there are some game breaking bugs. Skyrim tries to make up in quantity what it lacks in quality.

Sure you can put a couple hundred hours into cookie cutter quests where you talk to an NPC that has 5 lines of dialogue, go to a brightly light, linear, puzzle free dungeon, fight your way through a bunch of stock enemies, and retrieve a generic item but you'd be better off playing a real RPG.

The view that we ought not revere Skyrim, "antiskyrimism", is deeply unpopular. This position explains what that claim says and why it is so contentious. I thus argue that those who deny such beauty, can only do so in that some unknown problem underlies the uninformed assumption. They must either deny that there are any other RPGs, deny that the RPG category altogether, or deny that Bethesda broke new ground with the creation of Skyrim.